Jake and Dinos Chapman had their breakthrough in the early 1990s, as part of the group of visual artists known as the Young British Artists (YBA). Early on, the Chapman Brothers' sculptures created quite a stir due to their provocative and shocking nature. The artists, who are infatuated with the explicitly grotesque, invite the audience into a dark universe inhabited by melted mannequins and their weird and alarming hybrid children, along with original paintings by the German dictator Adolf Hitler, which have been bought and appropriated by the artists.

Jake & Dinos Chapman. Photo Maja Theodoraki

About the exhibit

The three parts of the Intermezzo series are all characterized by a sentient spaciousness in the form of large, embracive installations. Furthermore, the Chapman Brothers showcase two large installations—one of which is new and never before exhibited.

One of the two main installations is structured around four monumental dioramas, where toy soldiers are combating each other in an epic war battle. In the other installation, we are presented with a living room, which becomes the frame around a disturbing family, which is anything but trivial.

The Chapman Brothers' artwork is provocative, and the two are obviously on a mission of shocking their audience. Under the surface, however, their work revolves around complex issues, ultimately concerned with the essence of the human experience, which reveals larger and deeper analyses of society's relationship with religion, violence, sexuality, and morality.

Catalogue

A catalogue will be published for the exhibition with an introduction by chief curator Rasmus Stenbakken, and a written contribution by Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam, Ph.D. and associate professor at the Department of Communication, Arts and Cultural Studies at Aarhus University. Finally, Niels Henning Falk Jensby, author of the book Techno, writes about the artist's relations to war and the human body through a literary lens.